Saturday, May 28, 2011

Today, many hundreds of thousands of Hondurans will meet their returning exiles, including President Zelaya as they arrive at the international airport in Tegucigalpa. There will be celebrations, mobilizations and events across the country. A new phase of sturggle is opening in Honduras but the issues remain the same: the refounding of the country with a participatory Constitutional Assembly, an end to human rights violations and impunity and a resolution of the just demands of the campesinos, indigenous peoples, pobladores, trade union members and all the Honduran people on the path to a new Honduras.

For a variety of comments and viewpoints from the Honduran Resistance please go to the links provided for the FNRP, COPINH, OFRANEH, Artistas en Resistencia, and others

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The Committee of the Families of the Detained-Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH) celebrates the signing of the Cartegena de Indias Accord which permits the return of ex Constitutional President Manuel Zelaya Rosales to our country.

At the same time, COFADEH condemns the language of the oligarchy aligned with the coup in the text of the Accord which refers to human rights as a political instrument of “reconciliation,” evidence of their old practice of negotiation.

“While admitting that during the political crisis there have been people who consider that their human rights were violated, the Government of Honduras, through the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, commits to attend these denunciations in order to contribute to the reconciliation of Honduran society within a framework of verifiable guarantees (…) and awaits support from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights” reads the official, signed text.

The terms utilized reflect doubts, ironies, intentions and evasions on the part of the same political–military elite that attempted to bury the memory of the forced disappearances during the 1980’s and sell a manipulative discourse regarding human rights violations to the international community.

At the beginning of the decade of the 90’s the same ex Presidents - Rafael Callejas, Ricardo Maduro and Carlos Flores, who audited the text of the Cartegena Accord – repeated the need to leave the past behind and to end the “dark night of disappearances”.

This was their way to escape their own responsibilities, some of them as participants in the Alliance for Progress in Honduras (APROH) that inspired and financed the repression against political and ideological dissidence at that time and which continues to hold us in grief.

We have no doubt that ex President Zelaya signed the Cartagena Accord in absolute good faith regarding the urgency of investigating human rights violations that have resulted since the coup d’état to the present, to repair damage caused to the victims and to punish those responsible.

However, we have nothing but doubts regarding those who support the coup, control the repressive forces and sustain a fragile state that fails to overthrow the enormous monster of impunity with legality and justice.

Our doubts are underscored by the fact that with this Accord, the regime imposes recognition of the “Ministry of Justice and Human Rights as the entity that will permit the national capacity to promote and protect human rights in Honduras.”

This Committee does not observe habits, practices or policies that indicate that this institution makes even the most minimal difference within the State regarding the government Human Rights Commission which is delegitimized as a result of its partiality regarding institutional violence against the population.

Nearby, five teachers sustain an indefinite hunger strike due to violations of their social and economic rights; hundreds of campesino families in the zone of Aguán are surrounded by legal and clandestine forces acting against their lives and lands; and an average of 16 violent deaths occur each day throughout the country, in total impunity.

Therefore, we exhort the population to continue to use services worthy of your trust and respect, to access justice at all levels, local and international, as the people of Honduras rebuild institutionality and the rule of law that has been lost.

While North American diplomacy increases pressure to normalize the situation of Honduras at the international level and reinsert it into the OAS, the organized campesinos in Lower Aguan continue to fall to the murderous bullets of the paramilitary groups that enjoy total impunity and in the face of the complicit silence of the authorities of a failed State.

This morning, May 18th, Sixto Ramos, a member of the Nueva Suyapa Cooperative of the Campesino Movement of Aguan (MCA) was assassinated. Sixto was 45 years old. According to the initial reconstruction of the events, Ramos was driving his vehicle to work when it was intercepted by unknown persons in another car and they attacked with gunfire, ending his life.

“In the Lower Aguan the repression continues against us, people who are supporting the process of struggle for access to the land”, José Santos Cruz, member of the MCA and of the International Mission that in March, 2011 investigated the human rights situation in Lower Aguan, told Sirel.

“Sixto Ramos was a partner of the Nueva Suyapa cooperative and has always supported the process of struggle of the MCA. We feel that this new assassination is directly linked with the conflict that our organization has with the big land owners and palm oil producers in the zone”, said Cruz.

War Bulletin

Last week campesinos José Paulino Lemus Cruz andHenry Roney Díaz, members of the MCA and of MARCA respectively were brutally murdered.

On May 10th, Alejandro Gomez, a member of the cooperative La Trinidad of MARCA was kidnapped by private guards employed by the big land owners in the zone, savagely interrogated and tortures for almost three days and finally set free. He is currently in hiding for fear of being assassinated.

On May 15th, the campesino Francisco Pascual Lopez, 38 years old was disappeared. According to the information that is available, some people who were walking with him heard gunfire. When they arrived at the spot, Francisco Pascual had disappeared.

With the violent death of Sixto Ramos the number of members of campesino organization assassinated in the last 15 months rises to 28. None-the-less at the international level the pressure to reinstate Honduras into the Organization of American States is growing.

“They have not been able to defeat us with the massive militarization of the Army and the Police and now they are attacking us in a selective manner. They want to diminish our ranks by assassinating us one by one. For the MCA, we are meeting to take the necessary measures because we are not going to just continue denouncing the crimes.

The government trys to present a false image of Honduras. The country is not pacified and the people continue to die. It would be lamentable to ignore so many cadavers and human rights violations. The conditions for Honduras to return to the OAS do not exist”, concluded Cruz.

The Moskitia (mos-KEE-tya): it’s the largest, most magnificent expanse of tropical wilderness north of the Amazon – and the Indigenous Peoples who live there are determined to keep it that way.

For 3,000 years, Indigenous people have plied their dugout canoes up and down the Patuca River, the central artery of Honduras’ vast Moskitia lowland rainforest. On its rich floodplain they grow cocoa, oranges, rice, beans, cassava, and other crops for subsistence and sale, and its fish provide their main source of protein. “The river is our life,” says Lorenzo Tinglas, president of the Tawahka people’s governing council. “Any threat to the Patuca is a threat to four Indigenous Peoples—the Tawahka, Pech, Miskito, and Garifuna—and we will fight to the death to protect it.”

The fight is on. In January, the Honduran congress approved a contract with a Chinese company to build the first of three dams on the Patuca River. In February, the four Indigenous groups and Afro-Hondurans who share the Moskitia formed a united movement to save the river, their livelihoods, and their unique cultures. The Moskitia is a world-class treasure, and it will take international pressure to stop this project. Please write letters today. Gracias!

What difference would dams on the Patuca River make? For Miskito leader Norvin Goff, the answer is stark and clear: “Dams on the Patuca River mean ecocide and homicide.”

Why ecocide? Dams in the Moskitia tropical rainforest would decimate this richly diverse ecosystem both directly and indirectly. In the river, fish species that migrate upstream from the

ocean during part of their life cycle would be blocked by the dams

, threatening local extinctions. [Paula, I made this change on the assumption that the fish in question are not species found only in this river, in which case, an unqualified “extinction” is the wrong word. If they are in fact solely endemic to this river, and extinction is really the case, then we ought to make more of this in the text.] Downstream from the dam, the river’s volume, flow, and temperature would change, altering the habitats of shellfish, amphibians, plants, and bird species. Upstream, the reservoirs would submerge rainforest vegetation, soils, and organic matter, which would emit greenhouse gases as they rot. Reservoirs in the tropics produce high amounts of methane and carbon dioxide, accelerating global warming. The reservoirs and a network of roads would obstruct the migration patterns of hundreds of rainforest species. In the Moskitia, this includes endangered species like jaguars and tapirs, whose survival depends on large territories.

Why homicide? Indigenous villagers who live along the Patuca’s banks depend on the river for their lives and livelihoods. It is their only means of transportation and communication through the vast, roadless Moskitia. Dams would obstruct commerce and trade for thousands of people. On stretches of river between the dams, the flows, currents, and channels would be altered; people whose knowledge of the Patuca has sustained them for centuries would no longer master the river. Fish would disappear. Flood cycles that regularly wash nutrients over their agricultural lands would be changed. And road construction would open their forests to an unstoppable invasion of loggers, poachers, ranchers, and drug smugglers. The government even plans to build a military base to protect the construction project. “These impacts will be fatal for the survival of the Tawahka as a unique people,” says their elected leader, Lorenzo Tinglas.

As an endorser of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, Honduras officially recognizes Indigenous Peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent for projects that would affect them. But the Indigenou

s Peoples of the Moskitia have not been consulted and they have not consented to dam construction on the Patuca River. An international outcry is needed to defend their rights and to prevent destruction of a world-renowned tropical rainforest.

Please answer the call of the united Indigenous Peoples of the Moskitia : tell the Honduran government you stand with them against construction of Patuca III.

YOU CAN HELP
Write a Letter for this Campaign!

The Tawahka and Miskito organizations, FITH and MASTA, and the Black People’s Fraternal Organization, OFRANEH, ask us to write to Honduras’ president and send copies to the officials listed below.

A model letter is posted at http://www.culturalsurvival.org/take-action/honduras/2/model-letter
Send emails from the Cultural Survival website at http://www.culturalsurvival.org/take-action/honduras/2/send-email

In your letter, please:

Commend Honduras for endorsing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, which recognize Indigenous Peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent for projects that would affect them.
Tell the president that the Patuca III dam project is a test of Honduras’ commitment to Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and that his government must not approve construction unless they obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of the Tawahka, Pech, Miskito, and Garifuna peoples.

Express deep concern that damming the Patuca River will accelerate the impacts of global warming, threaten food security and the cultural survival of the Tawahka people, disrupt transportation and commerce for all the peoples of the Moskitia, alter a vital river ecosystem, and put at risk the invaluable biological diversity of Patuca National Park, the Tawahka Asangni Biosphere Reserve, and the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve.

Monday, May 9, 2011

The following members of COPINH were detained in San Pedro Sula along with others during recent protests for the re-foundation of Honduras and against the coup regime's "Honduras is Open for Business" conference:

1.-José Alexis Gomez (17 years old)

2.- Maria Leocadia Hernandez (40 years old)

3.-Yovana Isidora Cabrera (23 years old)

They report that other members of COPINH saw the police beat these three members of COPINH. Latest reports indicate at least the two women have been released.

CIVIL COUNCIL OF POPULAR AND INDIGENOUS ORGANIZATIONS OF HONDURAS (COPINH)

Down with the regime!!
Down with colonialism and modern day slavery!

We continue on our feet in struggle!

Enough colonialism! Enough selling off of Honduras!

URGENT PRESS RELEASE.In the face of the continual sale of our country and all of its natural goods like water, metal and mining resources, the land, territories, the beaches, the oxygen, the forests, native millenarian seeds, the intellectual property of the indigenous, black and general population of Honduras, a disastrous occurrence reimposed in the nefarious event called "Honduras open for business," we emit the following communiqué:

1.- We condemn the regime continuing the coup d'etat that systematically and in flagrant violation of Covenant 169 of the ILO, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People the Declaration of Human Rights and other national and international legal instruments, imposes projects of privatization of the rivers, such is the case of the hydroelectric complex on the sacred Patuca River with an irreversible impact destroying the existence of the Tawahaka People and other peoples and their Biospheres, the construction of more than 40 private hydroelectric dams that are accelerating the militarization and the violence in indigenous, black and peasant communities in Honduras, wind power projects with a terrible environmental impact, such as the project Hula HIll, concessions for mining, tourist and oil exploitation and others.

2.- We denounce that the event "Honduras Open for Business" is nothing more than the consolidation of colonialism and capitalist plunder, worse even than the signed Free Trade Agreements, with which the regime tries to accelerate even more the hand-over of the country to foreign corporations for the leasing and exploitation of natural resources, creating in addition a fiscal paradise in which narco-trafficking has a privileged position.

3.- We warn the local oligarchy and the transnationals that we will deepen our historic resistance in defense of life and mother earth and that in our vision of development a fundamental spiritual value is life in harmony with nature, which is to say respect of mother earth, which means no matter what we will now allow the promotion of avarice, destruction and death.

4.- We mobilize today in San Pedro Sula together with other social organizations to unite our voices, thoughts and actions against these acts with which the regime offers Honduras up for sale.

With the ancestral force of Iselaca, Lempira, Mota and Etempica we raise our voices filled with life, justice, freedom, dignity and peace!

Thursday, May 5, 2011

The Campesino Movement of Aguan (MCA) located where the Regional Center for Military Training (CREM) once functioned, due to the slow functioning of the appeals court in acting on the legal case of the compañero Jose Isabel Morales Lopez, make the following proclamation:

1. That the compañero has been imprisoned in the penitentiary of La Ceiba, Atlantida since October 17 of 2008 due to an arrest order based on false accusation from the prosecutor for the Public Ministry of Trujillo.

2. That his rights have been violated since the first day of his detention to the present, leaving a family without the right to food, education and health.

3. As part of this campesino movement we are denouncing that in recent days the compañero Jose Isabel Morales Lopez is being permanently harassed and threatened with death by four individuals imprisoned in the same cell, we are withholding their names as a precaution for the security of the compañero. Because of this we are asking for immediate action on the legal proceeding of his case for an immediate hearing. At the same time we are demanding real security for the compañero Jose Isabel Morales Lopez.

For the points mentioned above in this proclamation, if this call is not heeded, all of the Campesino Organizations and social organizations will take strong measures, and in the case of any attempt against our compañero, we will hold responsible the Appeals Court, the Prosecutor of the Public Ministry, the Criminal Court, and the official in charge of the penitentiary of La Ceiba, Atlantida and the Commissioner of the Penal Centers.

We call on the Special Attorney for Human Rights, the lawyer Sandra Ponce and on the Minister of Human Rights, lawyer Ana Pieda, on COFADEH and on the Human Rights Platform, to demand a rapid advancement of the legal process for our compañero, as soon as possible and we demand real physical security for him, if these calls are not attended to we will go to other national and international organizations because our rights belong to us, today, tomorrow and always.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Authentic Movement for the Revindication of the Campesinos of Aguan(MARCA) were victims of violent actions by the police, army and security guards in an attmept to evict them from the La Trinidad plantation.

As of now the takeover (by the campesinos -translation note) is being maintained. THe opposition of the campesinos impeded the eviction that was tried last night on lands in the possession of Rene Morales; however, we have learned from some communication media and from testimonies we have collected directly from the campesino leaders of this organization that the repressive organs persist in their attempts at displacement by force using heavy caliber weapons (M-60) among others) that have been used in other similar interventions.

The campesinos that initiated the takeover at 7pm on Saturday have been surrounded by the repressive organs of the State and by security guards. The situation is calamatous for the campesinos who denounce that they do not have access to food and water; and they are afraid about what has happened to 9 of their colleagues (8 men and one woman) who at the present are considered to be disappeared.

It is unknown if there is a legal order of eviction and, the most serious thing is once again there is the participation of the military and civilian guards with the the authorization of the police, the only institution (with standing) to intervent in these affairs.

Given the facts it is easy to infer that all the actions of the regimen have the aim of demobilizing the campesino organizations and submitting them to permanently using up all their forces (resources).

There is no information on the part of the INA (National Agraria Institute) about the legal situation of the lands in conflict (any investigation of the successive tract is not known), the legality of claims to the land, and the possession of lands in the hands of a foreigner such as Rene Morales, who according to the Constitution of the Republic cannot own lands less than 40 kilometers from the country's borders or sea coasts that surround us.

A note from the directors of the cooperative of La Trinidad to the Colonel of the 15th Battalion, the Police Commissioner and the General Directorate of Criminal Investigation says that " As you known we have been struggling with legal suits in the courts and tribunals of the country since 1994 against the businessman Rene Morales (Oleoplamas de Centroamerica S.A. de C.V.) who in an illegal and unjust manner dispossessed us of our properties".

That "we have taken possession of our lands but due to the corruption that exists in the tribunals of justice we have been evicted with legal orders that were obtained through prevaricate decision by prosecutors and judges "and that "ultimately you, as police, carry out (15th Battalion), DGIC have lent yourselves to the commission of grave crimes such as the abuse of authority, since without a judicial order you have come to evict us in an illegal manner".

-- From FIAN, International Honduras Section we reiterate that the agrarian conflict will persist as long as the regimen does not make political decisions to resolve the litigation and with that avoid that again the conflict produces the loss of human lives.

Get Email Updates - Reciba noticias por correo electrónico

News Sources / Fuentes de Noticias

Radio Progreso has radio updates (Spanish only) directly from the from the front-lines of the resistance in Honduras.

Une TV is one of the only independent national TV stations in Honduras

Rights Action has been doing good reporting and commentary as events unfold and has people on the ground monitoring the situation. They are also a reliable vehicle through which to get money to the organizations fighting for the restoration of democracy in Honduras.

Defensores en línea is the best (Spanish-only) online source for regularly updated information on the violation of human rights in Honduras.

Spanish - website of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras about the struggle of the Garifuna people and other resistance and environmental struggles.

School of the Americas Watch has good background information on the coup-plotters training at the Georgia-based School of the Americas / (also known as the School of Assasins) as well as news updates on the coup and a call to action.